Dr. Kari Selander is a policy strategist, institution-builder, and partnership architect with 15+ years operating at the intersection of international policy, multilateral engagement, and organizational strategy. She specializes in turning ambiguous, high-stakes spaces into tangible impact – building coalitions, translating complexity for decision-makers, and designing programs that produce measurable change at scale.
Her career has centered on one consistent capability: making complex, technical ideas legible to the people who have to act on them. From Ministries of Finance, Health, Education, Trade, and Environment across Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, to the boardrooms of the world’s largest philanthropic foundations, Dr. Selander has spent over a decade in the rooms where consequential decisions get made – not advising from a distance, but present, building trust, and driving results.
As Founding Director of the Oxford Policy Fellowship at Oxford Policy Management, she conceived and built OPM’s flagship global initiative: a technical assistance program embedding policy experts within government ministries across Africa and South Asia to drive institutional reform. She raised $5M+ in funding, placed 30+ fellows across 14 countries – including Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Namibia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Djibouti, India, and Pakistan – and personally led engagements with ministers and directors-general across all of them. The program was co-funded by ministers who saw its value because they had been involved in shaping it – a model of collaborative design that has defined her approach ever since.
As U.S. Country Director at Oxford Policy Management, she built OPM’s first American presence from the ground up, securing six- to seven-figure partnerships with major foundations including the Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, and Hewlett Foundations, and delivering substantive advisory work on public health financing, economic development, climate governance, and international development.
Dr. Selander holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Law and Sustainable Development from SOAS, University of London (Distinction), where her doctoral research focused on environmental justice and institutional accountability in Nigeria’s oil sector. She has been an invited speaker at Yale University, Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and has published in the Yale Journal of International Affairs and with the Open Government Partnership, among others.
She is currently focused on the intersection of AI governance and emerging markets development – specifically how frontier AI can be deployed equitably across low- and middle-income economies, and what the multilateral, civil society, and government coalitions required to make that happen need to look like.
Dr. Selander lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and dog.
Please contact Dr. Selander at DrKariSelander@gmail.com for full CV.
Dr. Kari Selander 